Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  The Brodkeys never called me Harold—Buddy was the name they used for me. Brodkey itself is equivocal, being a corruption of a Russian name, Bezborodko. To what extent Harold Brodkey is a real name is something I have never been able to decide. No decision on the matter makes me comfortable. It’s the name I ended with.

  In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, I was thirteen. Thirteen is an age that gives rise to dramas: it is a prison cell of an age, closed off from childhood by the onset of sexual capacity and set apart from the life one is yet to have by a remainder of innocence. Of course, that remainder does not last long. Responsibility and Conscience, mistaken or not, come to announce that we are to be identified from then on by what we do to other people: they free us from limitations—and from innocence—and bind us into a new condition.

  I do not think you should be required to give sympathy. In rhetoric and in the beauty of extreme feeling, we confer sympathy always, but in most of life we do quite otherwise, and I want to keep that perspective. The Brodkeys were a family that disasters had pretty completely broken. My father was in his early forties and had blood pressure so high the doctors said it was a miracle he was alive. He listened to himself all the time, to the physiological tides in him; at any moment he could have a stroke, suffer a blood clot, and pass into a coma: this had happened to him six times so far; people said, “Joe Brodkey has the constitution of a horse.” He was not happy with a miracle that was so temporary. And my mother had been operated on for cancer, breast cancer: that is, there’d been one operation and some careful optimism, and then a second operation, and there was nothing left to remove and no optimism at all. She was forty-five or so. My mother and father were both dying. There was almost no end to the grossness of our circumstances. There had been money but there was no money now. We lived on handouts from relatives who could not bring themselves to visit us. I used to make jokes with my parents about what was happening, to show them I wasn’t horrified, and for a while my parents were grateful for that, but then they found my jokes irritating in the light of what they were suffering, and I felt, belatedly, the cheapness of my attitude. My mother was at home, not bedridden but housebound; she said to my father such things as, “Whether you’re sick or not, I have to have money, Joe; I’m not getting the best medical treatment; Joe, you’re my husband: you’re supposed to see to it that I have money.” Joe signed himself into a Veterans Hospital, where the treatment was free, so she could have what money there was and so he could get away from her. I was in ninth grade and went to Ward Junior High School.

  We lived in University City, U. City, or Jew City—the population then was perhaps thirty-five percent Jewish; the percentage is higher now. St. Louis swells out like a gall on the Mississippi River. On the western edge of St. Louis, along with Clayton, Kirkwood, Normandy, Webster Groves, is U. City. The Atlantic Ocean is maybe a thousand miles away, the Pacific a greater distance. The Gulf of Mexico is perhaps seven hundred miles away, the Arctic Ocean farther. St. Louis is an island of metropolis in a sea of land. As Moscow is. But a sea of Protestant farmers. Republican small towns. A sea then of mortgaged farms.

  It used to give me a crawling feeling of something profound and hidden that neither Joe nor Doris Brodkey had been born in the twentieth century. They had been born in years numerically far away from me and historically unfamiliar. We’d never gotten as far as 1898 in a history course. Joe had been born in Texas, Doris in Illinois, both in small towns. Joe spoke once or twice of unpaved streets and his mother’s bitter concern about dust and her furniture, her curtains; I had the impression his mother never opened the windows in her house: there were Jewish houses sealed like that. Doris said in front of company (before she was ill), “I remember when there weren’t telephones. I can remember when everybody still had horses; they made a nice sound walking in the street.”

  Both Joe and Doris had immigrant parents who’d made money but hadn’t become rich. Both Joe and Doris had quit college, Joe his first week or first day, Doris in her second year; both their mothers were famous for being formidable, as battle-axes; both Joe and Doris believed in being more American than anyone; both despised most Protestants (as naively religious, murderously competitive, and unable to have a good time) and all Catholics (as superstitious, literally crazy, and lower-class). They were good-looking, small-town people, provincially glamorous, vaudeville-and-movie instructed, to some extent stunned, culturally stunned, liberated ghetto Jews loose and unprotected in the various American decades and milieus in which they lived at one time or another—I don’t know that I know enough to say these things about them.

  I loved my mother. But that is an evasion. I loved my mother: how much did I love Doris Marie Rubenstein? Doris Brodkey, to give her her married name. I don’t think I loved her much—but I mean the I that was a thirteen-year-old boy and not consciously her son. All the boys I knew had two selves like that. For us there were two orders of knowledge—of things known and unknown—and two orders of persecution.

  Joe and Doris had not been kind in the essential ways to me—they were perhaps too egocentric to be kind enough to anyone, even to each other. At times I did not think they were so bad. At times, I did. My mind was largely formed by U. City; my manners derived from the six or seven mansions on a high ridge, the three or four walled and gated neighborhoods of somewhat sternly genteel houses, the neighborhoods of almost all kinds of trim, well-taken-care-of small houses, of even very small houses with sharp gables and fanciful stonework, houses a door and two windows wide, with small, neat lawns; and from districts of two-family houses, streets of apartment houses—we lived in an apartment house—from rows of trees, the branches of which met over the streets, from the scattered vacant lots, the unbuilt-on fields, the woods, and the enormous and architecturally grandiose schools.

  Every afternoon without stopping to talk to anyone I left school at a lope, sometimes even sprinting up Kingsland Avenue. The suspense, the depression were worst on rainy days. I kept trying to have the right feelings. What I usually managed to feel was a premature grief, a willed concern, and an amateur’s desire to be of help any way I could.

  It was surprising to my parents and other people that I hadn’t had a nervous breakdown.

  I spent hours sitting home alone with my mother. At that time no one telephoned her or came to see her. The women she had considered friends had been kind for a while, but it was wartime and my mother’s situation did not command the pity it perhaps would have in peacetime.

  Perhaps my mother had never actually been a friend to the women who did not come to see her: my mother had been in the habit of revising her visiting list upward. But she said she’d been “close” to those other women and that they ought to show respect for her as the ex-treasurer of the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society. She wanted those women to telephone and come and be present at her tragedy. From time to time she’d make trouble: she’d call one of them and remind her how she had voted for her in this or that club election or had given her a lift downtown when she had a car and the other woman hadn’t. She told the women she knew they were hardhearted and selfish and would know someday what it was to be sick and to discover what their friends were like. She said still angrier things to her sister and her own daughter (her daughter by birth was ten years older than I was) and her brothers. She had been the good-looking one and in some respects the center of her family, and her physical conceit was unaltered; she had no use for compromised admiration. She preferred nothing. She had been a passionate gameswoman, a gambler: seating herself at a game table, she had always said, “Let’s play for enough to make it interesting.”

  People said of her that she was a screamer, but actually she didn’t scream very loudly; she hadn’t that much physical force. What she did was get your attention; she would ask you questions in a slightly high-pitched pushy voice that almost made you laugh, but if you were drawn to listen to her, once you were attentive and showed you were, her voice would lose every attribute of sociabi
lity, it would become strained and naked of any attempt to please or be acceptable; it would be utterly appalling; and what she said would lodge in the center of your attention and be the truth you had to live with until you could persuade yourself she was crazy: that is, irresponsible and perhaps criminal in her way.

  To go see my father in the hospital meant you rode buses and streetcars for three hours to get there; you rode two streetcar lines from end to end; and then at the end of the second line you took a city bus to the end of its line and then a gray army bus that went through a woods to the hospital, which stood beside the Mississippi. My father thought it was absurd for me to do that. He said, “I don’t need anything—sickness doesn’t deserve your notice—go have a good time.” To force me to stop being polite, he practiced a kind of strike and would not let me make conversation; he would only say, “You ought to be outdoors.” My mother said of my father, “We can’t just let him die.” Sometimes I thought we could. And sometimes I thought we couldn’t. If it had mattered to my father more and not been so much a matter of what I thought I ought to do, it would have been different. He was generous in being willing to die alone and not make any fuss, but I would have preferred him to make a great fuss. When he wouldn’t talk, I would go outside; I would stand and gaze at the racing Mississippi, at the eddies, boilings, and racings, at the currents that sometimes curled one above the other and stayed separate although they were water, and I would feel an utter contentment that anything should be that tremendous, that strong, that fierce. I liked loud music, too. I often felt I had already begun to die. I felt I could swim across the Mississippi—that was sheer megalomania: no one even fished in the shallows because of the logs in the river, the entire uprooted whirling trees that could clobber you, carry you under; you would drown. But I thought I could make it across. I wanted my father to recognize the force in me and give it his approval. But he had come to the state where he thought people and what they did and what they wanted were stupid and evil and the sooner we all died the better—in that, he was not unlike Schopenhauer or the Christian Apologists. I am arguing that there was an element of grace in his defeatism. He said that we were all fools, tricked and cheated by everything; whatever we cared about was in the end a cheat, he said. I couldn’t wish him dead as he told me I should, but when I wished he’d live it seemed childish and selfish.

  Sometimes my father came home for weekends—the hospital made him, I think (letting him lie in bed was letting him commit suicide), but sometimes he did it to see me, to save me from Doris. Neither Joe nor Doris liked the lights to be on; they moved around the apartment in the shadows and accused each other of being old and sick and selfish, of being irresponsible, of being ugly.

  It seemed to me to be wrong to argue that I should have had a happier home and parents who weren’t dying: I didn’t have a happier home and parents who weren’t dying; and it would have been limitlessly cruel to Joe and Doris, I thought, and emotionally unendurable for me to begin to regret my luck, or theirs. The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life should be anything.… Yet it seemed to me that I was being done in in that household, by those circumstances.

  * * *

  WHO WAS I? I came from—by blood, I mean—a long line of magic-working rabbis, men supposedly able to impose and lift curses, rabbis known for their great height and temperament: they were easily infuriated, often rhapsodic men.

  On the other side I was descended from supposedly a thousand years or more of Talmudic scholars—men who never worked but only studied. Their families, their children, too, had to tend and support them. They were known for their inflexible contempt for humanity and their conceit; they pursued an accumulation of knowledge of the Unspeakable—that is to say, of God.

  I didn’t like the way they sounded, either. In both lines, the children were often rebellious and ran away and nothing more was heard of them: my real father had refused to learn to read and write; he had been a semiprofessional gambler, a brawler, a drunk, a prizefighter before settling down to be a junkman. He shouted when he spoke; he wasn’t very clean. Only one or two in each generation had ever been Godly and carried on the rabbinical or scholarly line, the line of superiority and worth. Supposedly I was in that line. This was more important to Doris than it was to me; she was aware of it; it had meaning to her. Doris said, “If we’re good and don’t lie, if you pray for me, maybe God will make Joe and me well—it can’t hurt to try.”

  We really didn’t know what to do or how to act. Some people, more ardently Jewish than we were, said God was punishing Joe and Doris for not being better Jews. My real relatives said Joe and Doris were being punished for not bringing me up as a rabbi, or a Jewish scholar, a pillar of Judaism. “I don’t think the Jews are the chosen people,” Joe would say, “and if they are, it doesn’t look as if they were chosen for anything good.” He said, “What the world doesn’t need is another rabbi.” At school, the resident psychologist asked my classmates and me to write a short paper about our home life, and I wrote, It is our wont to have intelligent discussions after dinner about serious issues of the day. The psychologist congratulated Doris on running a wonderful home from her sickbed, and Doris said to me, “Thank you for what you did for me—thank you for lying.” Maybe I didn’t do it for her but to see what I could get away with, what I could pass as. But in a way I was sincere. Life at home was concerned with serious questions. But in a way I wasn’t ever sincere. I was willing to practice any number of impostures. I never referred to Doris as my adopted mother, only as my mother. I had a face that leaked information. I tried to be carefully inexpressive except to show concern toward Doris and Joe. I forgave everyone everything they did. I understood that everyone had the right to do and think as they did even if it harmed me or made me hate them. I was good at games sporadically—then mediocre, then good again, depending on how I regarded myself or on the amount of strain at home. Between moments of drama, I lived inside my new adolescence, surprised that my feet were so far from my head; I rested inside a logy narcissism; I would feel, tug at, and stroke the single, quite long blond hair that grew at the point of my chin. I would look at the new muscle of my right forearm and the vein that meandered across it. It seemed to me that sights did not come to my eyes but that I hurled my sight out like a braided rope and grappled things visually to me; my sight traveled unimaginable distances, up into the universe or into some friend’s motives and desires, only to collapse, with boredom, with a failure of will to see to the end, with shyness; it collapsed back inside me: I would go from the sky to inside my own chest. I had friends, good friends, but none understood me or wanted to; if I spoke about the way things were at home, or about my real father, they disbelieved me and then didn’t trust me; or if I made them believe, they felt sick, and often they would treat me as someone luckless, an object of charity, and I knew myself to be better than that. So I pitied them first. And got higher grades than they did, and I condescended to them. Doris said to me a number of times, “Don’t ever tell anybody what goes on in this house: they won’t give you any sympathy; they don’t know how—all they know is how to run away.… Take my advice and lie, say we’re all happy, lie a lot if you want to have any kind of life.” I did not see how it was possible for such things as curses to exist, but it seemed strange I was not ill or half crazy and my parents were: it didn’t seem reasonable that anything except the collapse of their own lives had made Joe and Doris act as they did or that my adoption had been the means of introducing a curse into the Brodkeys’ existences; but it seemed snotty to be certain. I didn’t blame myself exactly; but there was all that pain and misery to be lived with, and it was related to me, to my life; and I couldn’t help taking some responsibility for it. I don’t think I was neurotic about it.

  It seemed to me there were only two social states, tact and madness; and madness was selfish. I fell from a cliff face once, rode my bicycle into a truck on
two occasions, was knocked out in a boxing match because I became bored and felt sorry for everyone and lowered my guard and stood there. I wanted to be brave and decent—it seemed braver to be cowardly and more decent not to add to the Brodkeys’ list of disasters by having any of my own or even by making an issue of grief or discomfort, but perhaps I was not a very loving person. Perhaps I was self-concerned and a hypocrite, and the sort of person you ought to stay away from, someone like the bastard villains in Shakespeare. Perhaps I just wanted to get out with a whole skin. I thought I kept on going for Doris and Joe’s sake but possibly that was a mealymouthed excuse. I didn’t know. I tended to rely on whatever audience there was; I figured if they gaped and said, “He’s a really good son,” I was close to human decency. I was clear in everything I did to make sure the audience understood and could make a good decision about it and me. I was safe in my own life only when there was no one to show off to.

  Doris insisted I give her what money I earned. And usually I did, so that I would not have to listen to her self-righteous begging and angry persuasiveness. The sums involved were small—five dollars, ten; once it was eighty-nine cents. She had, as a good-looking woman, always tested herself by seeing what she could get from people; hysteria had inflected her old habits and made them grotesque, made her grotesque. No other man was left. No one else at all was left. Not her mother, not her own daughter by blood, not her sister: they ran away from her, moved out of town, hung up if she called. Her isolation was entire except for me. When a nephew of Joe’s sent me ten dollars for my birthday, Doris said, “I need it, I’m sick, I have terrible expenses. Don’t you want to give me the money? Don’t you want me to have a little pleasure? I could use a subscription to a good magazine.” I used to hide money from her, rolled up in socks, tucked behind photographs in picture frames, but it would always disappear. While I was at school, she would hunt it out: she was ill and housebound, as I said, and there wasn’t much for her to do.